


Catharsis

by komodobits



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 12.23 adjacent, Coda, M/M, a.k.a i blacked out the part of the ep where cas went up against lucifer, but like... not really - Freeform, but this is definitely what happened right?, cas being mean to himself, graphic violence and gore, lucifer being mean to cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-02 22:43:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10954251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/komodobits/pseuds/komodobits
Summary: “By all means,” Lucifer says, “you can try to hurt me, to atone for your mistakes. But they are your mistakes. I didn’t manipulate you. There was no sleight of hand, Castiel—you were weak. I was exactly what I’ve always been, and you were too stupid, and broken, and desperate to see it.”Castiel breathes through his teeth. “Kelly?”Her voice is soft. “I’m here.” She reaches forwards to touch his wrist, hand angled to stay out of the way of the angel-blade still tight in his grip.“So, now what, Castiel?” Lucifer says. “Are you gonna make me pay? Will you like yourself, then? Would you even know where to begin?”Castiel thinks he knows where to start.(12.23 adjacent coda)





	Catharsis

**Author's Note:**

> I've been talking for a hundred years to anyone who will listen about how all I want is a scene where Cas goes up against Lucifer, a la Mustang VS Envy from Full-Metal Alchemist. Unbelievable that I had to make it happen with my HANDS instead of Dabb providing me with the goods.
> 
> Anyway. What a great episode where everybody lived, right?

“Aw, well, this is cute,” Lucifer says.

 

Kelly stands at Castiel’s back, breathless and exhausted, her hair plastered slickly to her forehead with sweat. She has one hand curled nervously into the fabric of his coat—partly to reassure herself, partly to remind Castiel that she is there. To remind him that she is ready. Someone, at last, believes in him.

 

“You took my body,” Castiel says.

 

Lucifer’s head tips over, nonplussed. “You asked for it,” he says.

 

“You hurt my friends.”

 

A frown creases Lucifer’s brow; his mouth purses thoughtfully, and his voice is soft. “And you knew the consequences.”

 

Castiel steps forwards. Kelly comes with him. “You caused suffering and pain beyond measure.”

 

Lucifer scoffs, then, rolls his eyes. “Oh, please,” he says, low and scornful. “It’s what I do.” He levels an accusatory, mocking finger at Castiel, wags it back and forwards like he’s scolding a child. “Don’t you pretend for a second you didn’t know what I wanted when you let me in.”

 

Humiliation and anger rises hot in Castiel’s throat. His fingers tighten on the angel-blade at his side.

 

“Don’t try and swing it as though I’m the Big Bad Wolf,” Lucifer says, and his voice turns ice-sharp with condescension, “and I tricked you into enabling my violence. I never lied to you. You knew what I was after and you decided it was worth the gamble.” His smile thins. “You decided you could take me.”

“Stop talking,” Castiel grits out.

 

“So, by all means, you can try to hurt me, to atone for your mistakes. But they are your mistakes. I didn’t manipulate you. There was no sleight of hand, Castiel—you were weak. I was exactly what I’ve always been, and you were too stupid, and broken, and desperate to see it.”

 

Castiel breathes through his teeth. “Kelly?”

 

Her voice is soft. “I’m here.” She reaches forwards to touch his wrist, hand angled to stay out of the way of the angel-blade still tight in his grip. Her fingers are thin and cold, clammy.

 

“So, now what, Castiel?” Lucifer says. “Are you gonna make me pay? Will you like yourself, then? Would you even know where to begin?”

 

Castiel thinks he knows where to start.

 

He remembers Dean and Sam worrying about this power, whether it was good or dark. Right now, Castiel doesn’t care. All that he knows is that he is full to the throat with light and grace and fury until he can feel it snapping and sparking, white-hotly glorious, beneath his skin, behind his teeth.

 

He lifts his hand.

 

Castiel relishes the split-second before Lucifer realises what is happening—when Lucifer’s smile hangs, crooked and spiteful, from his mouth, before Castiel feels the fierce, iceburn rush of the nephilim’s power roaring up through his bones—and Lucifer’s smile fades.

 

Castiel shines hotter and brighter until the ground beneath his feet is baking hard, the grass curling blackly, and the first concussive wave knocks Lucifer back, reeling. The second takes his knees from beneath him so that he staggers and nearly falls.

 

He only just has the presence of mind to hope that Dean and Sam have done as he instructed, stayed back out of the way where he can’t hurt them—but the thought of them is slipping from his mind as sand through an open hand, everything in him narrowing to the pulse of power unlike anything he has ever tasted before. It shudders in his ears and quakes in his marrow and he can taste blood in his mouth.

 

The skin on Lucifer’s face is beginning to bubble at the edges. His smile is hollow, desperate. “You can’t kill me,” he says, and again, “You can’t kill me!” until he is screaming it.

 

Castiel says, “I can try.”

 

The nephilim’s grace sears all through his body like lightning, and the next eruption nearly flattens Lucifer, flays the skin from his cheek, punches the air from his lungs. Lucifer is gasping for air, retching as he stands, his body convulsing as though desperate to collapse but buffeted and battered by the force of each blast.

 

Distantly, Castiel is aware of the slow, wet trickle of something leaking from his nose, dripping it into his open mouth. There is a groaning, splintering sound, far-off as though heard through glass, Castiel’s ears filled with the low, thrumming of the inferno at his fingertips, and in Castiel’s periphery there is the dark shape of the old tree at the water’s edge being rent from its roots, the wood decaying and shattering and being thrown across the lake’s black glass. His bones are vibrating within his borrowed body, joints juddering, but there is pain he cannot feel it. His hands are a hurricane and he tightens his fingers as he stretches a hand out across the space between them, and the next pulse shatters Lucifer’s bones, his leg crumpling useless beneath him. There is the fast-flickering flashes of Lucifer’s wings as they stretch, all electricity and white fire and Grace, to tower above his head, and then they are cracking, bending at wrong angles and torn asunder.

 

Lucifer opens his mouth, and when he screams, “Castiel,” there is blood spilling from his teeth and his tongue.

 

Castiel lets his hand fall. Lucifer crumples to his knees, and he slumps there, half-boneless. With an effort, Lucifer lifts his head, his split, bleeding chin jutting up to the night sky as he rasps for air with a sound like a blocked drain. The air around them is still swirling with dirt and rocks and rubble, the eye of the storm not yet settled, and there is charred earth beneath Castiel’s boots.

 

He throws the angel blade aside. It clatters against the ground.

 

He wrenches away from the touch of Kelly’s hand.

 

“Castiel,” Kelly says, terrified, but he is gone.

 

“Come on,” Lucifer pants, hoarse, voice scraped raw, as Castiel stalks across towards him, and his mutilated, bloody mouth curves into a toothless grin. “Kill me. Do it.”

 

Somewhere behind Castiel, there is another voice, this one low, desperate: “Cas—”

 

Castiel slams his fist into Lucifer’s nose. With a hand curled into Lucifer’s collar, he hauls him forwards as he reels like dead-weight back, and he hits him again. Again. The skin is splitting and peeling, and it leaves dark blood, splashes of wet meat, on Castiel’s knuckles, and he knocks out teeth, and Lucifer is still smiling. It’s not enough.

 

Again, that voice: “Cas—Cas, stop.”

 

The vessel’s skull is splintering, white-hot Grace leaking through the cracks. The shattered eye-socket. The broken jaw. The blood, hot on Castiel’s hands, and he is breathing ragged, shaking so hard with the uncontrollable, unstoppable ferocity ignited within him that he can’t see straight, and this is not enough.

 

For everything he has suffered—for every failure and misstep and misjudgement; for sacrifice and desperate last-ditch effort; for every second spent, suppressed and small and subordinate, within his own body, while Lucifer used his hands to rip and wrench and tear; for every moment he has spent feeling weak and worthless and hollow—this is not enough. Castiel’s own knuckles crack and shift, and he goes on, Lucifer’s face unrecognisable now with blood and bone, and someone is crying out behind him with words he cannot understand, and then—

 

“Cas, stop—Cas!”

 

A hand on Castiel’s elbow—some feeble, fragile thing, the wrist-bone thin and weak enough to snap in one hand. Castiel jerks away from it, and he wheels to crush the interferer, this worthless speck who dares to step between him and the vengeance he has waited so long to exact. A human. Castiel curls a hand into the front of the human’s jacket, yanks it in and up to hold by the throat, and then:

 

The eyes, wide, startled, green. The open, struggling mouth. Blood in his hair, a fresh wound on his face. The flickering, golden warmth of his soul. Dean.

 

“Cas,” Dean whispers, and his voice cracks. “Stop. Please. You gotta stop.”

 

Castiel is breathing ragged. His hand, grasping the front of Dean’s jacket, is shaking. He can’t make himself let go. “He has to die,” he says, and the sound of his voice is foreign, a snarl with teeth in it.

 

Dean half-laughs, the sound hollow, a little hysterical. “No shit, man, but not like this.” One of Dean’s hands cups Castiel’s where it clenches into Dean’s clothes, the touch warm and steady; with the other, his fingers find and curl into Castiel’s sleeve, trying to hold him still. “This is Rosemary’s Baby, Cas—this isn’t you.”

 

The inferno won’t settle inside him, roiling and seething like he has swallowed a hornet’s nest, and he can’t breathe steady. He can’t look Dean in the eye. There is blood dripping from his broken hand and he wants to go on fighting. He manages, “I need it.”

 

“No—no, you don’t.” Dean’s grip on Castiel is unrelenting. He clutches tight enough to Castiel’s coat that his knuckles show sharp and white through the skin.

 

All Castiel has to do is pull away. He could rip his coat. He could shatter Dean’s hand.

 

He won’t do either.

 

“Just let him die,” Dean says. He lets go of Castiel’s coat, and then he has his hands on Castiel’s face. Castiel’s jaw, cradled in Dean’s two palms. Dean’s thumb rubs over Castiel’s upper lip, under his nose, and his hand comes away bloody. Castiel is touched gently. He is held. “Please, Cas. Just let it go.”

 

Slowly, Castiel’s raised fist falls to his side, his arm slack and useless. He is shaking, he realises, so violently that he judders beneath Dean’s touch, and he can still feel the brimstone and lightning where it shudders and rolls inside him. His legs are unsteady underneath his weight, and he sways against Dean. “I don’t know how.”

                                                                                                       

“Hey, it’s okay,” Dean says, and as Castiel’s hand loosens on the front of Dean’s jacket, Dean clings to him tighter, keeping him upright. “I got you, hang on—Kelly?” Dean twists his head over his shoulder. “Kelly!”

 

Beyond the ringing in his ears, Castiel hears footsteps, and then there is Sam Winchester on one side, his face creased with worry, and Kelly, with tears in her eyes. Mary has her hand on Kelly’s elbow to support her.

 

“Cas,” Kelly says, and she touches his elbow, her hand gentle.

 

“He’s weak enough now,” Castiel says tonelessly, his head twisting to stare past them at the mangled body that lies prone in the dirt. Lucifer struggles, broken bones scraping, and his breath rattles wetly in his chest. He is ripped open and raw, and Castiel feels as though he is the one who has been hollowed. He says, “An angel-blade will suffice. Sam—the honour is all yours.”

 

Sam looks at him. “What—are you sure?”

 

Silently, Castiel nods.

 

He doesn’t watch as Sam stoops to retrieve the blade, nor what he does next. He stays where he is, in Dean’s arms, sagging at the spine and shoulders as Kelly slowly bleeds her son’s power from his body. Her pupils flare yellow and then dim again into green. She pushes Castiel’s hair from his forehead, and he realises that he is soaked in a cold sweat. He is shivering.

 

Behind them, there is a brief flare of cold blue light, and then it is over. It is no more eventful than this: a flash that makes Dean flinch, and then the dark and the silence. Lucifer is dead.

 

“Come on,” Dean says, after a beat. His hands move from Castiel’s shoulders and put his arms around him; he lets Castiel lean heavily against him. His voice is low and soft, by Castiel’s ear. “Let’s go back inside. You did good.”

 

Castiel closes his eyes. He did good.

 

For so long, he has fought desperately to keep the ones he loves safe, and it feels that at every turn, he has made the wrong choice, or he has made the right choice and been reviled for it, and he is tired. With Kelly, he had his uncertainties, but at least someone, at last, was grateful to be protected by him. It has been some time since anyone had faith in him, but this—Dean’s arms around him, warm and steadying, and the Winchesters’ approval—this presses keenly on something like a bruise within him, aching and forgotten and desperate. He feels a hot stinging behind his eyes, and his throat is thick. He says nothing.

 

“Besides,” Mary says, her voice light, “we’ve got an angelic super-baby to deal with next.”

 

“One thing at a time, mom,” Dean says “Kelly’s not gonna burst just yet. We’ve got time for a beer, at least.”

 

“Amen to that,” Sam says. “First round’s on Dean, seeing as me and Cas literally just killed the devil.”

 

Dean grumbles, “Alright, alright,” and then they move away, Mary and Sam supporting Kelly, Lucifer’s body left in the dirt with the ash of his mutilated wings curving over his head in the burned, baked soil. Dean does not follow immediately. He presses his face into Castiel’s hair, and he breathes. Castiel is there with him, and for now, it’s not the end of the world—not yet, anyway. At last, Dean claps a hand to Castiel’s back, and he says, “Come on, hotshot. Beer. You earned it.”

 

“Thank you,” Castiel says, and it’s stupid, but it’s all he can think to say, after everything, after so many leaps falling short, crawling through the dirt and the disappointments to make his way back into the Winchester’s esteem. He is not a martyr, but he had always hoped he would die for a cause like this, to be held in high regard after he was gone. This is better. “Thank you.”

 

The kiss that Dean presses to Castiel’s forehead is only a brief, embarrassed thing, but it fizzes in Castiel’s fingertips, warm and sweet and good, and Castiel is grateful.


End file.
